Wine Facts: How Many Calories In Wine?

Wine Facts: How Many Calories In Wine?

You are about to approach a new diet and are wondering if you should really give up to your favorite beverage? How many calories in wine is a frequent question asked by those who love both wine and their silhouettes.

On the other hand, many wine enthusiasts are also wondering how to determine the caloric content of their homemade beverage.

Let’s see how many calories are in your wine and why you shouldn’t give up drinking a glass every now and then.

Wine And Caloric Content

Wine is obtained from the fermentation of the sugars present in grapes. As such, intuition tells us that if the grapes contain more sugars, your wine will have a higher alcohol concentration. Since more sugar also means more calories, common sense suggests that more alcohol equals more calories.

So, the first tip in determining the caloric content of your wine is by checking the label on the bottle. Winemakers rarely, if ever, include the number of calories on the label yet you will be able to find out the alcoholic concentration. The higher it is, the more calories the wine has.

Alternatively, if you just made your own wine, use a hydrometer to determine the concentration of alcohol.

But determining if a wine has fewer or more calories is not helpful in many cases. If you want more precise data, such as a number, you will have to do some maths!

Supposing you want to calculate the number of calories in a glass of wine, you will need to know the following data:

Alcohol concentration: also referred to as alcoholic strength, it is usually indicated on the label and expressed as a percentage amount of alcohol in the total volume of wine. For example, 12,5% vol. means that in 100 ml of wine there are 12,5 ml of alcohol.

Energy value of alcohol: fortunately this is a fixed value, and it is 7. There are 7 calories per gram of alcohol.

The specific weight of the alcohol: another invariable value which is 790 grams/liter.

The formula you need to use to calculate the energy input, aka the number of calories of a glass of wine is the quantity of alcohol multiplied with the specific weight multiplied with the energy value of the alcohol.

Now, to make a practical example and determine how many calories in wine, we will assume that you want to drink a glass of 100 ml of a wine containing 12,5% vol.

In this case, by using the formula above, you will have (12,5% x 100ml) x 0,79 gr/ml x 7cal/gr, which is about 70 calories.

However, considering that most wine glasses usually contain more than 100 milliliters of wine and that most of them usually have higher alcoholic strengths, the calories of a glass of wine usually vary between 110 and 120.

Does Sugar Affect The Overall Calories In Wine?

Another question that torments the minds of many is whether a sweet wine has more calories than a dry variety.

As we already mentioned, more sugar means more calories. Nevertheless, even though the grapes contain between 150-250 grams of sugar per kilogram, this sugar is consumed by the yeasts and transformed into alcohol.

After fermentation, the amount of residual sugar present in a dry wine is totally negligible, yet sweet wines have a higher amount of residual sugar in them. This means that if you like sweet wines, the real number of calories in a glass will be higher, as the formula above doesn’t consider the amount of residual sugar present in the wine you consume.

In this case, to calculate the exact number of calories in wine, you should multiply the caloric intake of one gram of sugar, which is 3,92 calories, with the amount of residual sugar present in your wine, then rapport it to the quantity of wine present in your glass. Add the result to the number of calories obtained by using the formula above and you’ll know exactly how many calories are in your glass of wine.

Wine And Daily Energy Needs

If you’re drinking wine regularly, then you might want to know that sipping your favorite beverage can account for about 12% of the recommended calories intake.

To calculate this, we considered drinking a couple of medium-size wine glasses a day and related them to the “standard” daily requirement of an average adult, that is about 2000 calories per day.

Although this might seem much, the truth is that the caloric content of wine is much lower than that of other beverages, such as liqueurs or even sodas.

Regarding the type of wines and their caloric content, there is a negligible difference between reds and whites.

This means that you can simply indulge yourself the luxury of savoring the wine you most enjoy, or the one that pairs better with your dishes.

Wine Burns Calories

Now, after a long debate about the calories in wine, we must mention that according to a study conducted by the researchers at the University of Alberta, in Canada, wine actually helps you lose weight.

The molecule responsible for this effect is called resveratrol and it has beneficial effects on health similar to those of physical exercise.

In other words, now that you know how many calories in wine, pour yourself a glass and enjoy it!

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